If it’s Thursday morning, that means another segment with Mark Starling and the crew at First News 570. It seems a week can’t escape my view before I have to talk about Facebook. Personally, the big news this week is Magic Leap. For years, people pegged it as vaporware, but they announced a not-so-vaporific headset that may compete against Hololens and Occulus. We’ll just have to see.

Always tune in LIVE on Thursdays at 6:43 am on First News 570.

SCIENCE FICTION MEETS SCIENCE REALITY AS FORD OUTFITS 75 WORKERS WITH EXOSUITS, PUTTING RIPLEY TO SHAME
Remember the movie Aliens, and the exosuit Ripley was wearing when she kicked the Xenomorph’s ass? Well, science fiction meets science reality. Ford Motor Company is outfitting 75 of its employees in 15 countries with EksoVests. A device that wraps around the upper body and provides an assist when lifting heavy objects or reaching for items overhead. Ekso Bionics is the company who invented the device and were original deployed in 2 US factories for testing. Ekso says a person’s work day at Ford may consist of listing a bag of flour over their heads 4600 times. Ford thinks the EksoVests are an intermediary between a human doing something and a full-on robotic solution.Read more

I have been busting my ass lately, but if it’s Thursday morning it’s time for more tech news with Mark Starling and the crew at First News 570. Make sure you listen LIVE every Thursday morning at 6:43 am.

DETERMINED NOT TO REPEAT PAST MISTAKES, FACEBOOK BANS POSTS AIMED TO INTERFERE
Credited with influencing the 2016 election, Facebook is determined not to make the same mistake twice. Facebook has begun banning accounts and pages that are suspected to be influencing voter behavior. Facebook has said that it has found 17 suspected profiles on Facebook and 7 on Instagram. That may not sound like a lot, but those 17 have already filed 9500 posts. In all, 290,000 user accounts have followed these 17, and the 17 had purchased 150 ads on FB and IG. Be careful out there and always consider the source when reading your news.Read more

Mine was alright, pretty busy, lots of late nights. But if it’s Thursday morning, it’s time to point and laugh at the latest technology news, and we have some good stories for First News 570. You can always listen LIVE and hear me and Mark Starling talk trash about tech.

OK GOOGLE, FIRE
Artist Alex Reuben decided to try something different with Google Assistant. Instead of asking Assistant for directions or order a pizza, he instructed Google Assistant to fire a gun. And Google Assistant dutifully did. Now, this isn’t necessarily AI, but really programming and an impressive rig to pull the trigger. But it does raise some questions about what limits, if any, we should put on artificial intelligent software. In real terms, Reuben still pulled the trigger and not the AI, but remember these machines think. Honestly, I don’t think we’ll seriously explore limitations on AI until it’s too late. But until then, we can use Google Assistant to shoot up apples.Read more

I liked the Internet more when you had to use sendmail to actually send an email and only nerds and academics used the thing. The latest, shiny, Internet thing has caused grown ass people to question their hearing trying to discern the words “Yanny” and “Laurel” from a fuzzy audio recording. I can implement this stuff, but don’t understand the allure.

Definitely not, Laurel

I talk about Yanny (not to be confused with Yoni), ZTE, and cable this week on First News 570 with Mark Starling. Make sure you listen in every Thursday morning.

TEENAGERS CAUSE GROWN ASS PEOPLE TO QUESTION THEIR HEARING
For the record, the word that was spoken is “Laurel”. Unless you have better things to do, or live under a rock, you may have noticed that many usually rational people fell into another Internet trap of listening to a poorly recorded word and determining if the spoken word was “Laurel” or “Yanny”. Not to be confused with Yanni. And yes, I heard the word spoken as Laurel. People I respect and thought were “alright” claimed that they heard “Yanny”, when in actuality, Vocabulary.com said that they hired an opera singer to speak the word Laurel for its records. The Internet has a penchant for new and shiny things, what makes this worse than the dress is that a whole bunch of adults wasted time on a sensation started by some high school kids. I hate the Internet.Read more

It’s summertime up here in DC. Anyone who’s lived here long enough knows that Spring only lasts a day and then the heat comes on. Automation is the theme for this week’s stories, as El Goog’s conference, IO, leads the news this week announcing new gadgets and services that will be available this year. Mark and I shared these stories and more on First News 570. Listen LIVE.

VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS OUT OF WORK, BECAUSE VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS TAKE THEIR JOBS
First, in-house secretaries got the shaft because of virtual assistants. Now virtual assistants are getting the shaft because AI virtual assistants will soon be putting the human-based remote workers out of business. Earlier this week, Google announced a service called Google Duplex which is an AI that can make calls on your behalf. Instead of calling up your human virtual assistant, Google users can now call up a service and ask the service to make an appointment based upon their behalf. So, instead of calling the beauty shop to book an appointment, you would first call Google to tell them you’d like to book an appointment. The AI uses human speech technology to communicate with a real human on the other side. I can’t wait for the day when AIs communicate with each other based upon humans’ behalf and fight it out.Read more

UBER AND THE US ARMY TEAM UP TO BE ALL THEY CAN BE
Uber recently launched a contest to find an international city to become a test bed of its flying taxi service. In preparation for the contest, Uber needs a quieter copter car to shuttle people around. The US Army, and Uber have decided to collaborate on development of a new kind of air taxi that features double rotating propellers to for a quieter flight.Read more

ROBOTS CONTINUE TAKING JOBS, THIS TIME IT’S THE STOCK BOYS
Thanks to Peapod, Uber Eats, and other food delivery services, humans aren’t expecting to travel anywhere. In order to take advantage of a population wanting delivery, British supermarket chain, Ocado, has deployed a workforce of 600 robots to fulfill grocery delivery orders. The supermarket has deployed robots that travel in the drop ceiling and robotic arms that can pick up to 50 items to fulfill an order. After the orders are picked they are then guided to trucks for deliver. The 600 robots are supported by 300 human personnel. As more supermarkets get into grocery delivery, Ocado intends to build fully automated distribution centers that can be offered as a service to others.Read more

I’ve been hard at work on a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have time to keep track of the zany world of tech and humanity. Mark Starling and the crew at First News 570 reported on these stories.

DOWNLOADING MUSIC IS NOW OBSOLETE AS USERS TURN TO STREAMING
Apple is announcing that they are announcing the shut down its iTunes Download Service some time in 2019. Meaning, that the service will not precisely shutdown in 2019, but Apple will announce a shutdown date. Apparently, today’s music listeners prefer to stream their music instead of downloading it and taking up precious space. Best Buy stops selling CDs, and now Apple will no longer sell downloadable mp3s. What’s next?Read more

It’s true. I’m not a fan of the month of April. And it has nothing to do with showers, golden or otherwise. For the last decade, I have dueled with the Tax Man and writing these grip worthy checks. I can’t stand it. But, I’m coming to the end. Anyway, I had enough time to come up with some of the week’s top tech stories. Facebook can’t keep its nose clean and is asking the EU and Canada if it can use its facial recognition tech. Strange given the heat they’ve been taking these last several weeks. Well, here are the stories Mark Starling and I shared with the good listeners of First News 570. You can always listen LIVE on Thursday mornings. Oh yeah, Task Rabbit.

EU PUSHES HUMANITY ONE STEP CLOSER TO ROBOT APOCALYPSE BY INTENDING TO TREAT BOTS LIKE PEEPS
150 experts from 14 countries wrote and signed an open letter to the European Union as the body began deliberations to recognize robots as electronic persons. The parliament intended for the law to be used as a means of holding smart bots and other decision making systems accountable for their actions when they do something wrong. THIS JUST SEEMS BAD. I’d like to think there’s already recourse available through the company, but recognizing robots as people, electronic or organic opens up a huge can of worms when we really don’t understand how these systems work. If you want to have a debate on what it means to be alive, my personal question: “do you have to fog a mirror in order to be alive?”, sounds fine and we can do that all day.Read more

We need term limits. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, testified before Congress over the past couple of days and it was readily apparent that they didn’t know too much about how Facebook works. Furthermore, some lawmakers took the opportunity to complain about bias in Facebook’s News Feed. This is why we need term limits.

Any who, Zuck’s testimony led the news this week, but we talk about some other important tech news this week on First News on 570 with Mark Starling.

It’s been a hot mess over at the company that makes the Big Blue app. Facebook has dominated current tech events ever since news broke about what we’ve known all along, Facebook’s data handling and sales of it is sloppy. This week we continue exploring this story with Mark Starling and https://twitter.com/newsradio570?lang=en. Listen LIVE every Thursday.

WYLIE: FACEBOOK LISTENING TO YOU WHEN YOU THINK IT ISN’T
Facebook continues to have a tough March. So much, that they’ve postponed the launch of a new smart speaker because of the data scandal. I’d like to blame all of this on Mercury being in retrograde, but I can’t be for sure. This week, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, testified before the UK parliament about CA’s data handling policies and he dropped a treasure trove of data dirt on how Analytica influence the US election as well as Brexit. One of the not-so-surprising revelations he dropped was the possibility that the Facebook app is using microphones to spy on users seeking additional data to mine. The app performs micro-samples of audio to pick out small tidbits you might be saying. Anecdotally, I’ve had friends say that they’ve said something about needing to go to Home Depot only to find an ad for Home Depot in their timeline. We all knew that this was happening, it didn’t scare us then, and it shouldn’t surprise us now. Me. I no longer have the Facebook app on my phone, I only access it via webpage.Read more